The Vault

Andrés Cerpa’s second book, The Vault, is a brooding collection of lyric fragments that cohere a story of mourning, despair, addiction, and oblivion. On its surface, this is an elegy on the death of a father, but that elegy shape-shifts like a fog abutting dusky sea-cliffs.

In the first of the book’s two sections, Cerpa assumes a familiar, lyric address, writing to interlocutors―“dear Gregorio,” “dear Julia”―with a poet’s steadied precision: “you left this world as if there were others.” Here Cerpa establishes his methodical pace: single lines hardly ever more than four or five beats, double-spaced, with a single tab lending controlled saccadic variability. This lineation and syntax guides Cerpa’s smooth, melancholic turns of thought:

I have seen them in restaurant windows as I pass alone
rooftop
          palm of light
in my one life
          I have stood above the labyrinth
& touched what is not there

As the book progresses into the second section, Cerpa eschews these addresses and begins to assume various generic shapes, at moments flirting with a werewolf persona, at others a vampiric one. At one point, the poet gets caught, briefly, in a Dantesque, subterranean epic. These genres, rather than containing the work, seem to jostle inside the poet’s interiority. None fully coheres and what is often at bottom is an articulation of voids―whether empty rooms, vaults, ocean, or sky: “Snow today & my breath meets the dial-tone sky.”

While Cerpa exposes myriad personal vulnerabilities, he also remains in impressive lyrical command. His rhetorical pace is musical, his images lapidary, and his metaphors startling. This is, in the end, a great performance, a poetic opera conducted with nearly mythological power:

A bit of flame in the wind. Blood
in the flash. There is no god,
so I move my own heaven